Customer: St Maurice Church

Old Site

This is the old St Maurice Church main landing page:

The site was cumbersome, unorganized and stagnant. In addition, the image at the top of the page (and each page) was a Flash movie that vertically panned across an image of the church. The entire user experience was poor, discouraging use of the website.

New Site

This is the new St Maurice Church main landing page:

Immediately, you can see if has a much cleaner look to it. Critical information is on the main page, and navigation to other content has been pared to essential pages. Response is very fast, due to the use of optimized images, better overall design, and the elimination of the Flash movie that was loaded each time a page refreshed.

Design Considerations

This was a total redesign of the parish web site. Nearly all of the images on the site were also photographed as part of the project.

St Maurice is a good example of a site that serves a broad community of users with continuously changing information. As you can imagine, such a community would comprise users of varying needs and computer literacy. As such, it needs to be simple to use.

To keep the site vital, content on the Home and Parish News pages are updated regularly. In addition to text content, the site now includes podcast recordings of the weekly homilies, as well as streamed video recordings of other presentations.

The multimedia is played through Flash players built for the site. The content is optimized for streaming over the internet, resulting in very fast loading times with no streaming issues. The multimedia enhancements have turned out to be a favorite feature of the new website, with the user base broadening considerably.

For the more technically adventurous parishioners, the site features an RSS feed enabling them to obtain up to the minute information. The XML file that drives the RSS feed is also dynamically transformed to populate the "What's New" information.

To maximize flexibility and minimize maintenance, the website is driven from XHTML and PHP templates and cascading style sheets (CSS).

With these changes, the website has become an important channel for the parish to interact with the parish community.